Originally Posted by
xLuther
if you let concur do it's thing, you end up visiting a lot of places, tango fares and wasting day travelling.
I found it very hard to get a day travelling with concur. Its multicity doesn't work the same way as ITAand won't recognize itineraries that could be done on a single fare. I found it very hard to get YYC-YVR-YYZ to meet up with a colleague doing only YVR-YYZ. (routings like that would show up, but often not the exact one I needed).
I find dealing with their call center horrific. Often took ages (longer than AC as E50k) and generally not very competent.
They are horrendous at dealing with the expense side of flight passes. They don't issue an invoice for the full FP and they don't include the value of the FP credit on the individual booking, hence there isn't a single opportunity for you to claim the expense. I prefinance the FP on my personal credit card and expense segment by segment to various clients. I had to revert to printouts of AC FP purchase and individual credit bookings. For a company who's core business model is around expenses, not travel, I found this a fatal mistake and I have very rarely used them since that adventure. I now run my FPs outside concur alltogether.
Contrary to other posters, concur often shows a Sabre price for AC flights that is about 5% less than the direct AC booking (which we also see) so in our case cheaper, not more expensive.
Keeping track of credits is hard to impossible. But if you know you have one, applying one to a new booking on the phone works well, albeit at the increased booking fee. You're on your own to get that sorted on the expense side though, which is great fun if the credit transferred from travel for one client to another client.
I think the system works reasonably well for infrequent travellers that don't know AC's backend, fare constructs, routings, etc very well. If you're not E50k/SE, they'll probably beat AC in taking care of you in irrops (at a higher final cost).
All in all, I think they fail at their core premise of managing the entire expense workflow. Most of my colleagues seem to manage however, so maybe I'm just not a good match.